


Written in Sand

by samjohnsson



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-24 01:48:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/628936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samjohnsson/pseuds/samjohnsson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zip gave me open season on hir fill for this, with suggestions of AUs, and timeline tweaks, and five things, and found families. </p>
<p>As with all things s01 Fringe, I love when stories ask more questions than they answer. I got this little idea, this little seed of "what if". I may end up running with it farther, eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Written in Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ziparumpazoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziparumpazoo/gifts).



It had been a long week for Astrid.

It was an honor to have the chance to work with Agent Dunham. Dunham was smart and ruthless - also notorious for going to any length to get answers for the family, even if would never hold up in court. And she had an ability to research and connect patterns that rivaled Astrid’s training.

But working with either of the Bishops, let alone both? Astrid was pretty sure that wasn’t a wise career move. Lysergic acid diethylamide aside, seeing the...quasi-science Dr. Bishop happily embraced was unnerving. No amount of Spongebob and Schezuan could make up for spinal probes and sensory deprivation in the name of a technological séance. Even if it was successful, it was so outside of what she trained for in college and Quantico, she didn’t know how to deal.

She didn’t trust Peter: everything about his mannerisms presented as misdirected hyper-intelligence, not unlike his father but redirected to even less legal venues. And some of what Dunham had specifically said (and tacitly) about his background made her like him even less.

Even so, as much as she distrusted the Bishops, Dunham needed a second she could trust. She needed someone she could leave in the lab and keep an eye on the Bishops and generally run paperwork while Dunham did the fieldwork. And when she talked to her fellow junior agents and advisors, everyone knew Broyles or knew of him - even if no one ever knew what he was actually tasked with. That sort of early recognition in the agency was priceless.

And frankly, cracking the Pattern? Her fellow computational linguistics nerds would be jealous of the algorithmic complexity, to say nothing of her computer science professors. So she signed more confidentiality agreements than she thought possible outside the military, and went home.

Finding a package from her father on the stoop was the perfect end to her week, given their usual level of “communication”. Opening it, she found an old leather-bound journal with the initials “A.F.” in silver foil and a crisp white sheet tucked in between the yellowing pages. Unfolding the new page only revealed the usual type of paternal love note from her father.

_My beautiful girl,_

_I haven’t heard from you in the last couple weeks. I know visiting your old man doesn’t necessarily fit into the busy schedule of an up-and-coming FBI agent, but I was thinking about making mom’s cioppino this Saturday if you can swing by. You could even bring some of your friends from work, if you needed._

_Anyway, I was cleaning out the attic, and found this journal in a stack of your mom’s mother Agnes’s papers. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but judging by the dates it might be from wherever she was before she came to Brockton. Shows who you got your head for languages from. I thought maybe you’d be able to put those degrees to some actual use beyond clerical duty. If you find anything interesting, think about letting your old man know!_

_Love,  
Papa_

She carefully flipped through the pages, intrigued, only to find handwriting in what at a glance was a series of dated journal entries, each in a different language or code. It was the perfect symbol for where her life was headed. The only strange thing was, she thought her grandmother’s maiden name was Donovan.

Well, maybe this week would have some redemption.

* * *

It was an interesting time-filler, between documenting Agent Dunham’s shenanigans in agency-appropriate language and filling Dr. Bishop’s requests. So far, she’d only had time to translate a dozen entries. Several had been in French or German, but the one she was working on now was in Mongolian. Unlike the others, this was a short one. Astrid hoped she’d get a chance to get a chance to check the vocabulary against a dictionary after going in to work.

Then the day exploded, all around an incident in Brooklyn and a tapered, vibrating cylinder.

\---

After the hospital, coming back to the lab to find papers strewn everywhere, and getting Peter back, she finally got home. Sleep was tempting, but Astrid knew what sort of dreams she’d have; there were still enough sedatives in her system to affect her. She figured she’d knock out one more entry. Over reheated wontons and a cold glass of wine, she quickly sketched out a translation, then froze, staring at the words.

_Tuesday, June 23 - I’m leaving a message here: never stand in front of the doctor again, unless I’ve verified there are no syringes in reach._

She checked the translation twice, pulling up several sources for the Cyrillic loanwords. Still the words remained the same, haunting in their echo.

* * *

It was another short entry, in Latin, this time. A nice, simple entry was just what she needed, after having to complete the acres of paperwork to cover up the death of an entire diner. In a change that tickled her cryptographer heart, her grandmother had written the entry using a four-step Caesar Shift, even when the entry contained little more than a list of groceries and errands “to do the next few days I have off.”

\---

She didn’t realize it when she was looking at the DNA. Stress distracts the sharpest mind, she knew from her exams. But when she got home, and realized the synchronicity - that the day’s entry involved the exact same cipher as the DNA linked to Jones - she wondered. So little time dealing with these fringe cases, and she’d already learned to distrust coincidence. And while the Caesar Shift was the textbook cipher, she wondered.

* * *

Astrid woke up early that morning, even though it was her day off. Something bothered her, kept her tossing all night - possibly dreams about those transgenic creatures at Swift. She remembered these restless episodes from college and knew there was no point, so she figured she might as well get up and get started on the next entry. Thumbing ahead showed it to be a long one, longer than normal, and interestingly, in two languages. The Gaelic was easy, as she knew a good online reference, and spoke of a book Agnes had received that morning. The middle excerpt, though, was completely different, Algonquin if she recognized the morphology. She snapped off the first few lines to a school friend of hers doing tribal language reclamation in northern Maine right before her phone rang with Agent Dunham calling about a new case.

\---

Her home laptop was flashing with a new email in her personal account when she finally came home from filing all the paperwork, including the follow-up on making Lane disappear. She was surprised Tonya had been able to respond within the day.

_Salve, Astrid:_

_It looks like old Maliseet, roughly from the time that the French established their first fur-trapping colonies. Consider this all the usual warnings about contextual translation with such a small fragment and from such a different time-depth._

_“A black horizon approaches. Our growth of knowledge has dramatically outrun those of the human soul that man, a creature defined...”_

_I should note that the phrase “growth of knowledge” is sometimes translated as “science”. Not sure if this line makes sense - it doesn’t match any Algonquin myth I’ve heard. If you send me the rest, I can get it back to you in a few days._

_Amicia, Tonya._

She closed the journal and the email, carefully, and reached for her phone. She knew that line, having read it word-for-word from the ZFT earlier that day, right after the “warriors” passage about Lane. Three times: whether in cryptography, linguistics, or good old science fiction, the old saw about the relation between accident, coincidence, and conspiracy always held true. And now that she read through the longer entries and saw echoes, things she personally recalled, minor details from the days in between the more obvious entries, she wondered. She had translated less than a tenth of the journal, after all. Astrid had to let someone know, if only so she could justify focusing her time on translating the book. This journal, whoever - and whenever - it came from, might save even one life from the Pattern. Given that, she saw no choice, and knew exactly who to call.

“Olivia? It’s Astrid. I know it’s late, but we need to meet, now. I’ve been given something I think you should see...”


End file.
